The New York Times criticizes Carver for relating science to God (1925); Carver's type of science.

Chapter 14 - Science Is Truth

 
Tom Huston of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts of Columbus, Georgia, felt a burden of debt to Carver for years of free crop-saving analyses and advice to his employees. “God didn’t charge,” Carver said, “for His work in making peanuts grow, so I won’t charge for mine.” He had refused so many times to take Huston’s money or offers to be a high-paid employee, that Huston began pleading with him to name something—anything—he would take. Finally relenting, Carver said, “I want a diamond.”
Huston didn’t understand why a man who wore no jewelry would want a diamond; but fearing Carver might change his mind, said simply, “If you want a diamond, you shall have it,” bought a valuable one and had it mounted in a ring and delivered. A few days later he asked his Chemical Director, who was going to visit Carver, to find out if he liked his present. Carver wasn’t wearing the ring, but when the chemist asked him about it, he said he was delighted to have it and pulled open a drawer in which were collected stones in boxes labeled 1 to 10, the diamond being in box 10. His scale of mineral hardness, used to test what will scratch a substance and what it will scratch, was complete, the diamond being four times as hard as number nine, corundum.

“My God, Carver,” Huston erupted as Carver was dispensing free advice, “you’ve got to come and work for me!” “He isn’t only your God, Mr. Huston,” Carver said gently. “You can’t expect Him to devote Himself exclusively to the problems of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts, and you can’t really expect it of me, either. I’ll help you all I can, but my place is here.”
“God has promised to take care of us,” he said, “so I am not worried about finances. “But,” someone exclaimed, “if you had all that money, you could help your people.” “If I had all that money,” he said, “I might forget about my people.”

 
His legacy to us was so much greater than to have made products which moved rapidly in some long-dead market, or to have helped make a high-tech society which we now know leads to stress, not leisure. His great significance to us now is that he stands ready at any time to show us a way of living which supports everyone in a way that can be sustained over the long term. Putting nature study first in education, if widely done in his time, would have averted earth-wide environmental perils originating in human disconnection from nature. On the personal level, it would have taught the masses intelligent use of nature’s cost-free products and good gardening, helping to free individuals from economic systems which profit a few and trap the rest. His example of keeping technology simple enough to be equally useful to rich and poor could have staved off the amassing of economic power into a few hands. His genius as a recycler of everything, taken to enough hearts, would have left plenty for us today.